CHAPTER 7.

Admission to hospital

By then I had a new Home Church leader an Austrian called Peter and he became concerned for my mental health.

He took me to a hospital’s Accident and Emergency centre and I saw a doctor and the doctor said Yes, you are mentally ill. But I wasn’t detained. Soon after Peter brought my parents to see me and I agreed to return with them to their home in North Wales. My behaviour was still high and bizarre so they brought a GP to see me and then a Consultant Psychiatrist. I wasn’t detained but I knew I was in trouble so that night I left the house and I hitched to London. I told the church HQ where I was and then 2 young police officers came and detained me and then I was transferred to a mental hospital in Muswell Hill, London.

I was quite relieved to be in this nice hospital, I had a bed, tea and coffee and above all I was being told to eat whereas my spirit guide was constantly telling me to fast.

I wasn’t sectioned (detained by force) but I decided that if the doctors think I am ill that there must be a reason for this and I’d like to find out what that reason is. I was put on an older anti-psychotic tablet called Largactol but it had little effect on my high deluded state of mind. The hospital was nice, a bit like a hotel and I was quite happy there.
Mum and Dad came to see me and a nurse explained that there is a hospital near to my parent’s home and asked Would I like to go there? I said OK.

So, sometime later I caught the train with a nurse and I went to Denbigh Hospital in North Wales. But I soon found this hospital was completely different from Muswell Hill. It was poor and it was Welsh. There was little food and the senior nurse was very authoritarian. It was horrible.

I was still on Largactol and I wasn’t getting any better and I realised this and I wanted to help my doctors to help me.

So, I did a drawing of a tree and the 2 types of spirit element (water and air) which fed the tree, this was what my spiritual awareness was suggesting to me.

The reasoning behind this is that a tree is from God’s point of view symbolic of man and a tree needs air and water to live. If you have read my 3 essays on the Two Ways to Relate to God you will be familiar with this concept?

I showed the drawing to a nurse and the nurse asked if he could show it to the Consultant and I agreed.

The next thing I know is that I was put on injections of drug called Clopixol.

So, what is Clopixol?

Clopixol is an extremely powerful early anti-psychotic that works effectively but it has huge side-effects. I got all the side-effects. Muscle stiffness, tremors, tiredness, slowed thoughts, slurred speech and basically feeling extremely poorly. Because of these side-effects I wasn’t able to express or defend myself. The only relief was sleep. I was shocked and I suppose I felt betrayed.

But the psychosis went away and I was discharged for Xmas but I was to be kept on the injections in the community! A Social Worker was assigned to me and he said I had to have the injections and if I ran away I would be hunted down and brought back. Awful!

At first I still tried to be honest about my faith but my parents hated Sun Myung Moon and were determined to drive me away from my beliefs.

After 3 months I saw the Consultant, I was hoping that he would reduce the dose of Clopixol. He asked, Do you still believe in Moon? I said Yes and then he declined to reduce the dose.

So, I realised that I would have to lie about my faith until I regained my freedom. My Dad made me burn my copy of the Principle and then after that the subject of a life of faith was dropped and the only talk was about my recovery and returning to work.

The next time I saw my Consultant and he asked me for my beliefs I said I no longer believe in Sun Myung Moon or his Principle and he reduced the dose.

Over the next year I attended a rehabilitation centre which approved me for retraining as an electronics engineer. Then I managed to get on a one year course on electronics and microprocessor programing. I made good friends there. We went to the pub every lunch hour. I worked as hard as I could and I got good grades. When I finished the course I applied for a job advertised in the paper. Dad warned me in his typical paranoid way to never say I had ever been mentally ill.